Main Street was one of the gold-medal attractions during the 2002 Winter Olympics.
The shopping, dining and entertainment strip became a pedestrian celebration zone, drawing giant crowds of winter-sports fans from across the globe. They displayed pride in their homelands, they partook in the popular hobby of Olympic pin trading and they watched as the Budweiser Clydesdales traversed Main Street. They partied into the early morning hours and woke up ready for another day of Games competitions, followed by more revelry on Main Street.
There has not been anything like it since.
The annual Park City Kimball Arts Festival on the Main Street blacktop lasts just one weekend, is held in the summer and provides limited room for free-flowing crowds, with the artist booths occupying so much space. The Park Silly Sunday Market occurs one day a week during the summer and fall, and it is based on lower Main Street, with limited activities on the upper part of the street. The pandemic-era pedestrian days offered space on Main Street for social distancing but were not designed to attract crowds and keep them occupied with activities. Other celebrations involving Main Street, like the annual Independence Day and Miners Day parades, are one-day affairs.
But as Park City enters the early stages of planning for the 2034 Winter Olympics, there are lessons from the recently wrapped Sundance Film Festival about the potential role Main Street could play when the state hosts the Games for a second time.
The Main Street plans devised for Sundance, in certain ways, closely resembled those crafted for the Winter Olympics in 2002. There is no such thing as an absolute parallel between special events like the Winter Olympics and the film festival, but the similarities were striking this year. Main Street during Sundance in 2026 harkened back to the Games of 2002 in ways that had not been experienced in the intervening 24 years. There was not an effort to replicate the 17 days of the Winter Olympics on Main Street for Sundance, even as elements of the plan for January nearly did so.
The festival this year was the final edition of Sundance held in Park City before the event moves to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027, but the blueprints for Main Street last month could ultimately help guide some of the Winter Olympic planning in the coming years.
It was the second consecutive festival that Park City removed traffic from Main Street during the prime days and hours of Sundance. The municipal government quickly devised a pedestrian zone for the 2025 film festival as a security measure in the period immediately following a New Year’s truck attack in New Orleans. There was no time last year to arrange programming for the pedestrian zone. The space on the street drew the festival crowds nonetheless, as they moved off the notoriously cramped sidewalks of Sundance.
In anticipation of this year’s festival, however, Park City officials and Sundance had months to consider the plans for a pedestrianized Main Street. The result was a scene in the Main Street core during the opening days of Sundance designed to bring crowds of film lovers to the street, offer the festival-goers various off-screen activities, highlight Sundance sponsors and provide space to celebrate.
It appeared to work as designed.
Independent film fans moved up and down Main Street and onto Swede Alley as they explored the offerings. Some stopped by an installation marking the 20th anniversary of the Sundance film “Little Miss Sunshine,” while others watched a video board installed at Miners Park showing images of past festivals interspersed with a commemoration of late Sundance founder Robert Redford. Adobe opened a temporary location in rented space along Main Street, transforming the exterior of the building with a large logo on the front. It was one in a series of corporate setups that arrived for Sundance. The pedestrian zone provided space for a concert on upper Main Street, replete with a temporary stage. People packed onto the street. The afternoon of the first Saturday of Sundance had shoulder-to-shoulder crowds on some stretches of Main Street.
The Main Street pedestrian zone formulated for the Winter Olympics in 2002 had similar aspirations but was designed at a larger, more ambitious scale and with a longer duration. Park City officials and the organizers of the Games, realizing Main Street would be a natural gathering spot, wanted to highlight the street as they crafted a vision for the community’s part in the Winter Olympics.
The street was ready-made for a Games-long celebration. It became one of the locales that allowed Park City to successfully serve as the quaint, scenic mountain complement to Salt Lake City. Park City Mountain and Deer Valley Resort — two competition venues in 2002 — were within walking distance of Main Street, and the crowds at the sporting events were anticipated to gather there before and after the skiing and snowboarding contests. The crowds at events at the Utah Olympic Park invariably wound up on Main Street, as well.
The decision to close Main Street to traffic during the Games was made more than a year before the opening ceremony. It was one of the crucial pre-Games moves made by the City Hall leaders of the era, and it teamed the municipal government with the organizing committee as the pedestrianized celebration zone was planned.
The Main Street core was transformed for the Games with installations by official Olympic sponsors, entertainment and other activities. The Clydesdale horses were stabled on Swede Alley. Coca-Cola constructed a temporary building for pin trading on a small portion of 5th Street outside the Main Street post office. General Motors operated a Chevy Hot Zone where the Kimball Art Center was located at the time. There were numerous other temporary setups for the Games on or close to Main Street. Fireworks capped the evenings. More than 500,000 people were counted on Main Street during the Games.
Security was heavy during the Winter Olympics and Sundance, and the protection involved a cadre of public-safety agencies for each event. The municipal government in 2002 and this year needed to devise traffic, transportation and parking plans that accounted for the Main Street traffic closure and aimed to protect Old Town from being overwhelmed by drivers headed to the festivities.
The city government in 2002 worked with the Games organizing committee to accommodate the temporary presence of the official sponsors alongside the permanent businesses in the Main Street core, essentially the same as what occurred between the municipal government and film festival organizers for Sundance. The entirety of the Main Street plans for the Winter Olympics and Sundance required approval processes through various departments.
Park City’s progress on the Winter Olympic work has been fitful in the 18 months since the International Olympic Committee awarded the Games of 2034. The Winter Olympic possibilities for Main Street will likely be addressed throughout the course of the talks between City Hall, the community and the organizing committee. A timeline for the municipal efforts is not clear, but the eight-year countdown to the opening ceremony begins on Tuesday.
When the Games in Utah begin on Feb. 10, 2034, Sundance will have just ended its eighth annual 11-day run in Colorado. And Main Street in Park City could be following a script that was at least influenced in some ways by a film festival that was held eight years earlier.